 na maina tante i wapan проophone, ka t For us, it's all about sustainability in relationships. That's why we focused on a monthly fee as opposed to doing project pay stuff. I really like lifetime value and recurring revenue through a relationship with a handful of customers. Yes, so we bold the membership plugin. We're in the product space of WordPress. We're also releasing a theme soon, so we're going to tap into that market. It's a lot better than consulting. I've found just a personal preference in the products base, and I guess we'll chat about it a bit more soon. OK, so my word is fascinating because I'm into creating that experience for the clients through a systemised system. Cool, so we basically are moving towards productised services to generate recurring revenue. That's one of our main pushes, and that will be a foundation for our custom development work that we do for clients. So my phrase I said in my talk, but communication is oxygen. Overcommunicate as much as possible, that's it. My comment is that developers tend to take on too much work, and because of that the customer service levels are compromised. I don't think developers are good communicators with human beings, that is, maybe with applications. Hence my talk. And I think the point you raised about the money is a critical one for clients because of those expectations and scope. That scope needs to be clearly defined, and sometimes developers need to understand that even the clients don't understand the breadth and the scope of the scope, if you understand what I'm saying. A specific question is, how do you deal with your supply and demand of your capacity? Interesting, so I'm in a very different situation to most. I don't have money to Friday available to me to work on development work because of the business I run with my wife. So the specific thing that I have done, and it was one of the items on the slide, but it wouldn't have made sense if you didn't see it, but I've very specifically niched down to what I offer. I don't do sidebalds, I don't do front-end development, I do plug-in and theme customisations, and that's all I do. So if I look at a project, if I look at a customer's description of the project, I can see that it's going to be anything longer than about three days, I don't do it because I know that anything over three days is going to require more focus from myself than what I'm capable of giving the client. I need to be able to get it done within a three-day period, which for me is a week because by the time the weekend comes around I'm then switching to the weekend business and I can't then, I'm getting to that point now and I don't mean to insult anybody who's older than me, but I'm getting to that point now where I can't remember what I was doing on the Friday when it comes to the Monday that happened to me on the weekend. So my recommendation to freelancers who are going to be dealing, or anybody who's dealing with, it's easy when you're working for a company or for an agency, you're generally working with either a project manager or one client at a time, when you're in the freelance space and you're working with multiple people, my opinion, the best thing to do is to niche down. And I would say for yourself who is employing developers in a freelance in capacity, you might find that the way you can get the best value out of those developers is if you hire them for niche projects or hire a front, don't hire a generalist, hire a front-end developer for your front-end work, hire a back-end developer for your back-end work, hire somebody to manage your database so that you get the best out of that person for that part of the project, that would be my opinion. OK, so like I've explained in mine, I book clients in, so even sometimes I have to book clients in like a month, you know, it will only be like maybe two, three months later that I work with them. But I've found that most of the times that doesn't indicate a good time for them to create the content and to get everything done. And then also that we have that dedicated time spent on them. And what John said, I also work with creatives and photographers mostly. So the sites are very similar and we know that we can get it done in that week. It doesn't always happen like that. There's always some things, and especially when there's like shops and membership sites, it's extra, but then you plan for that and you book in more weeks. But I think the working in weeks or days or whatever you prefer is a good way of doing that. How do you guys get better, more, better quality clients? How do you guys get more, better quality clients? So we used to build websites. We kind of started off in the like low barrier mark. As soon as we pushed up our prices when we were happy with our quality of work, the clientele is totally different. We found clients that were happy to pay like three times the rate that we were charging, wasn't even making us jump through hoops. Like they were super easy to work with. We found the super cheap clients where, you know, they wanted to squeeze you for like that little bit of money. So just raise your price gradually until you get to the point where you're happy with and then you'll see a different clientele coming in. Something that I think is super important that a lot of people don't do is to create, there's different names for it, but like an ideal client profile or customer avatar, whatever name you've heard if you've heard that before. But basically what you do is you kind of imagine your ideal client, give them a name, a gender, an age as much of it like a demographic profile that you can and then you then from there you say, well where do these people hang out? Will they be on LinkedIn? Will they be on Facebook? Will they be in Facebook groups? What kind of magazines would they read? And you build as much as you can of what that one person would be like and then if you're going to spend money on PPC or if you're going to do SEO or whatever it is, whatever your content strategy is going to be then you can take that profile and you can target that to that ideal person and so like what Andrew was saying raising your prices is a great thing but now you've got this profile you can decide what kind of money does this person spend what kind of thing do they expect and so for us in our business something that's important to ask for our ideal client is that they are someone who runs a small business that's successful but they're super busy so they need an online presence, they need marketing done they're intelligent enough to do it themselves they can probably figure out how to do it themselves but they're not interested because they love their business and they want to do what they do in their business so they don't want to learn how to do what we do and so as an expert they're willing to pay for our time because it saves them time so we turn away people who are like semi DIY kind of people because what they do then is they say well I could do it myself and that devalues us because I can do it myself and save the money or I can learn to do it myself I don't really need you when they actually do so from my point of view you have a client profile and then you can target those people with your advertising and your content like your organic traffic content marketing and you can go hang out in the Facebook groups that they're in you can find them on LinkedIn that kind of thing I just want to add to the fact with raising your prices how we've done it we also did just normal web design we were like coming in cheap just to get the clients and then living in that nightmare but then we started to raise our prices but we couldn't just increase the quote and expect everything to fall in place so what we did is we started writing very detailed proposals and in the proposal you say you set your timelines your expectations in yourself like you said as more of a consultant almost and in that way you can increase your prices because you're positioning yourself as a more professional so there's a website called WP Elevation that gives you great tips on how to write very good wordpress specific proposals please repeat that website WPelevation.com I just want to add one small thing to that I don't think anybody here who works with clients or runs an agency or whatever doesn't know that information but it's always about the fear if I raise my prices I'm going to lose clients if I charge more they're not going to want to work with me if you go online and you search for those of you who know Pippin Williamson he runs Saniel's Development Easy Digital Downloads they did a series of price increases that were I think either double or triple their original pricing and they blogged about the process and they lost clients but they ended up earning more money and were able to then give their current clients way better support so don't be fearful of making a change if it has to be incremental that's fine if you want to go big and go hard that's also fine but don't be fearful of making that change to make a better life yourself Super thoughts it makes me think of Brennan Beshard and Jeff Walker Jeff Walker is the guy from Product Launch Formula or PLF, like the book that launched Brennan Beshard Experts Academy and they will both speak deeply into this contact and they will say it starts with good stuff make sure your stuff is good and if when you got good stuff then you can raise your price and that makes me think about what we were saying earlier guys make sure you you're creating the business that you want and that you will have fun with and that links to what Shane what I heard you say is I want to work with the people I want to work with and when we're having that fun we do better work and we get better reputation, get better feedback we get customers that cross the line that actually do the stuff that we're offering the services and the products so really good questions so then the natural consequence of finding good, better quality customers and clients is that your business grows how do you guys where do you go to find a good development network, people that you can outsource to that you can partner with as you want to grow and scale your business there are different ways you can do it in my experience and understanding so one of those is like something Jonathan mentioned when he was speaking which is like a service that he's a part of but there's other ones like Upwork and it's hit and miss we've used some developers and designers from Upwork and so in the beginning what I would do is I would pick two people give them the same job, see how they do and then you've got to pay double for that work but you get to sort of figure out who works the way that you want to so there's that you can find freelancers online there are those ways but other ways that I was discussing with some guys yesterday actually let's say I build websites and I want to offer my clients marketing services but I'm not up skilled enough and I don't have the time there's a marketing agency you can work together and a nice way that some people are willing to do it is you can white label one another's services so they would be a marketing company but the client will be on your books they will do the work they will white label it for you so it still remains your client and then they could they either give you like a percentage of whatever they make or they reciprocate by sending you the kind of work that they don't do but you do so that's another idea and then also places like this like WordCamp is like a perfect place many people as possible so I found Jonathan at WordCamp many years ago and if I need like serious hardcore development he's my guy and the same and the other thing is WP elevation so if you actually become part of the community and you do the course there are a lot of people and they do things the same way as you do it because you all do the same process and so I met a girl she was also from Pretoria and now we do things together she's more into the design and I'm more into the bold and it works perfectly because we've got that same way of doing things I can always say stuff but I just want to touch on what Anshon said about the community get involved in the community get to know the people in the community build those relationships with the other people in the community I have met just because I'm involved in the Wordpress Cape Town community just for WordCamp and I'm involved in the Slack I meet so many people with so many different skill levels that I can bug Dan when I need some front-end answers or I can bug Andrew when I need some plugin answers that I don't know or whatever and the key thing there is to be involved don't join the Slack and then go hey guys I'm so-and-so and I'm looking for developers and then never say another thing again because then you become part of the noise again so I'm not saying spend every hour but log on every now and then and say hi and see what conversations happening and communicate with us and get to know us because we are a friendly bunch if this is your first time at a WordCamp you've probably found us all to be amazingly friendly and open and chatty and that's who we are that's kind of how Wordpress is what it is so get involved because when you get involved in the community you meet all these people of different skill levels you can then find out who they know and who they know who they know and your network just my network is tenfold so get involved in those communities How do you better delegate so how do you communicate more effectively so that what is done is what you are asking for I think it's important to use tools available like project management tools like Asana was mentioned earlier and you also mentioned that so I think tools like Asana your own internal tools and even stuff like Google Docs can be really useful and like Jonathan said over communicate almost internally but it's never going to go perfectly you just need to keep communicating and keep at it and use the tools available to track progress and track time and track communication on specific tasks and projects and stuff so that's my opinion it's always a struggle but it helps if team members got like a specific tools they do so with us we've got the process and Meraka does like a certain amount of the work a specific side of the work and things like that specific roles but it does especially when things it becomes hard so what Anshun said about creating processes so what I found is doing this for like 12 years a lot of the processes are like in my brain they look like a kind of muscle memory and when somebody like new you're getting someone new to do something they'll ask you and then you'll I'll either just do it myself because it's quicker or I'll explain to them how to do it and then re-explain or something you know so what I realized is if I can do a video recording like a screen recording of that and keep it all together in like a repository of SOP standard operating procedures and then I give like anyone new access to that and then it's like okay well if they ask me how do I do the specific thing and check it's there it's either screenshots or there's a video recording or something like that so I'm going to answer this question slightly differently because I don't currently work in an environment where I manage people I want to I want to eventually get to that point where I'm managing a team of some kind but I had the advantage or the privilege at least should I say of managing the word camp kept on organizing team this year and one of the biggest things that I discovered is that and I know this about myself, I'm a terrible manager I'm a micromanager of note and if it's not being done I'm going to get stuck in trying to do it myself and then that means I'm doing everything and that's not ideal so this year I took a step back and we organized teams within the team and we organized team leads of people that I knew that I could trust and then I just trusted them to do it trusted them to do what I know they can do and I understood that so I just stepped in on that team if I needed to and obviously it takes some time to build that trust, I had the advantage that most of them were on the team last year when I was running around doing almost everything but those that did what they did well I then put them as team lead positions in the different teams and that worked really, really well so my my suggestion would be to find people who you work on that trust and you get them to that point of trust and then just trust them to do what they do but then again communicate we had a situation this year where the lack of communication was a key warning sign to me that one of the team leads wasn't managing and so I contacted him and I discovered that he was having some family related problems that was impacting his time and it was a very delicate situation because I can't just walk in and say look I'm going to take over whatever the case may be so I had to kind of get him to make the decision to say I'm going to step back can you get someone else to take over and that's worked out well so being able to manage that kind of scenario at least if you have people that you trust in other areas then you can just deal with the fires that come up Thank you Just from my side as a business coach we use the website address www.h which stands for who does what, where and when and how are they doing that so Asana is a gift I run my life for Asana and Evernote especially my thinking life as well but it can get you can lose traction of the granular specifics so some of you have mentioned specifics so one thing I've learnt to do myself is to get good at what it is when I'm saying have you done it what is it and who, what, where and how specifically as granular as you can to that it and that helps our teams keep the traction